A mobile device may communicate with third party applications via data sessions transmitted over a communications network. In contrast to desktop computers which may be connected to data sessions for extended periods of the time, a data session may be initiated each time that data is to be communicated between a mobile device and a third party application. However, the initiation of data sessions may not be efficient for communications between a mobile device and some third party applications. For example, a social network application may initiate a data session to send an update to a user's mobile device whenever another user in the user's social network provides an update. If the social network application initiates a data session for each of many updates to the user's mobile device, the user may be charged an additional amount for each of the many data sessions that provide the updates.
Alternatively, if the user initiates a web browser to request updates from the third party application, the user may occasionally forget to initiate the web browser and request updates for a significant period of time, thereby resulting in the user eventually viewing many stale updates that provide information that is no longer timely. If the user's mobile device periodically initiates a data session to request updates from the social network application, the periodic initiation of data sessions may occur too frequently or not frequently enough. If the other users in the user's social network provide many updates, the mobile device requesting updates from the social network application every two hours may result in receiving many stale updates long after the stale updates were available. If the other users in the user's social network provide few updates, the mobile device requesting updates from the social network application every two hours may result in initiating many data sessions for which no update is available, which also may result in the user being charged an additional amount for initiating each of the unnecessary data sessions. Furthermore, using many power intensive data sessions may result in quickly reducing the battery life for the user's mobile device.